Minneapolis — Pablo López will deliver the first pitch of the 2023 American League Wild Card Series on Tuesday. Scattered around the stands of Target Field, Richard Adair, Leah Olson, Matt Pettersen and John Tantzen will be watching.

It will have been 6,937 days since the Minnesota Twins last won a playoff game. They have lost 18 consecutive postseason contests in that span since Oct. 5, 2004, marking the longest playoff losing streak in not only baseball history, but in the history of American “Big Four” sports.

Adair, Olson, Pettersen and Tantzen have been there for every one of those losses at home. (Except for the 2020 American League Wild Card Series, which fans were not allowed to attend due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

October baseball should be cause for jubilation, for hope. It’s the reward for players and fans alike at the end of a grueling, 162-game war of attrition. Any team left standing can wipe out everything that came before, get hot and go on a long run.

Any team but the Twins, it’s seemed for a long time.

“Yeah, I have a feeling of dread,” said Pettersen, a teacher in Amery, Wis. “We’re going to get in, and it’s fun to watch them win in the regular season and stuff. … And even though the pitching is better than it has been, I just have this feeling that, you know, we’re not going to be able to win any games. I definitely have that there.”

“I always kind of feel like that Michael Scott [from ‘The Office’] meme of, ‘I’m ready to be hurt again,’” said Andy Johnson, a Twins fan and social studies teacher.

A tinge melodramatic? Perhaps. Fatalistic? Without question. But is there even a “proper” emotional and logical response to be expected with regard to a one-of-one occurrence like this?

Every time a Twins team makes the playoffs, the manager and players are inevitably peppered with questions about the streak, and every time, they don’t exactly seem sure what to say — and why would they? The vast majority of them have absolutely nothing to do with a Yankees comeback off Juan Rincon, or with a fair ball being called foul by Phil Cuzzi, or with Torii Hunter’s futile dive that turned a sinking line drive into an inside-the-park homer.

The only things in common throughout the streak spanning losses in 2004, ‘06, ‘09, ‘10, ‘17, ‘19 and ‘20, really, have been the team name on the front of the uniform — and the fans who watched, owning the entire narrative.

“We’ve had three managers now be a part of this streak, and how many dozens of players?” Johnson said. “Probably hundreds of players, and they’re not necessarily the ones who, like, were the streak when they added on their couple of games to it. But it really is a streak of the fans who have been here for closing in on two full decades of it.”

The math behind the streak has long since left the realm of the absurd.

In the oversimplification in which each game is modeled by a coin flip, the odds of a team losing 18 straight games is 1 in 262,144. As computed by Twins fan Chris Hanel for a video retrospective about this Twins losing streak, factoring in the Twins’ maximum win probability in each game extends those odds up to a frankly unbelievable 1 in 65 billion.

If this is to be considered some sort of collective regional and generational struggle, it would, of course, figure that different fans would process those emotions in different ways.

Perspective is everything in that. For the younger generation of Twins fans, 19 years feels like an eternity, and it’s all they know.

“It doesn’t matter until they win a playoff game,” is a refrain often seen from the more cynical of them after anything remotely positive at any point in the regular season, year after year. Why get too invested if it’ll only end up as another data point in — literally — the most inglorious streak of all time?

But through all of this, some of those that have been there for the most postseason losing are actually the ones to maintain the most optimism, levelheadedness and relentlessness about seeing all this through — because many of them have also seen what’s on the other side.

The Twins do remain the last Big Four sports team of the state to have won a championship — that, having come all the way back in 1991, when Jack Morris’ immortal Game 7 performance against the Atlanta Braves gave Minnesotans their last taste of glory at the following what is still widely considered one of the greatest World Series ever contested. For younger fans, Game 163 in 2009 is the closest they’ve come.